The Public Art of Skip Dyrda
The Man Who Came To Dinner
This mural was created on the top floor of the Palm Avenue Parking Garage in downtown Sarasota as part of the city’s “percent for arts” program. For this project, five artists or artist teams were invited by Denise Kowal, founder of the Sarasota Chalk Festival and its companion mural initiative, Going Vertical. I was one of the five selected, along with Marco and Monica Bell, a group from South America, an artist from California, and one from France. Each artist was assigned a theme—opera, dance, movies, music, and mine: theater. I chose to focus on The Players Theater, Sarasota’s oldest theater, and one of its early productions featuring Vernon Kimbrough, who later became mayor of Sarasota and president of Ringling School. The mural was painted with high‑quality acrylics on primed concrete block. I would normally have used mineral paints, but budget limitations prevented it, and the mural is now in need of restoration.
More Images
Before I started painting. Walls looks great here since the garage was recently completed and so the walls were primed and painted by the contractor.
I believe that I took this photo in 2024 and you can see how the surface has deteriorated.
One of the puzzles I thought that I had to solve was that big white vent. This was part of the elevator ventilation system and I knew that from past experience, painting that aluminum vent wouldn’t work so well, so I made it part of the design, the idea being that this was a back stage door. That’s a friend of mine using my ‘red string’ to lift the vent out of the way.
I replicated one of the original theatrical posters for the play, “The Man Who Came To Dinner”.
Here we see the ticket taker, still in progress. I had my daughter pose for this part of the mural. And I made a mistake within the mural, not once, but twice! So here’s your clue to find it.
In progress. I called this my ‘penthouse’. I had a lovely view of downtown Sarasota and could see the bay from here. And…I hate using ladders.